Peace Corps volunteer from New Orleans uses soccer to teach children in Moldova about health

Volunteering in Moldova, a small country in eastern Europe, for two and a half years with the Peace Corps is providing Thomas Reade of New Orleans with invaluable skills to pursue a different path to the one he was originally on. These days, he is teaching the students of Moldova about health through soccer.

Thomas Reade,front left, of New Orleans, plays UNO with some of his students in Moldova.

“I was doing the whole law thing and then Katrina happened, and we watched it for days on end, and I realized besides from my legal background there wasn’t much I could do,” Reade said. “I wanted to change where I was going at the time.”

Reade quit his job at the Arizona State Attorney General Office and moved in with his brother in New Orleans where he worked odd jobs. Realizing he was lacking in community work skills, Reade set out to remedy that by applying as a volunteer for the Peace Corp.

“You don’t find out where you’re going until you get a final contract, they send you out this packet with job description with some basic background and I went on Wikipedia to find out where Moldova was,” Reade said.

Moldova, nestled between Ukraine and Romania, is one of Europe’s poorest countries. With only 3.5 million people, nearly half of the country’s population still lives in rural communities and many Moldovans work abroad leaving grandparents to raise the children.

“With the exchange rate the average Moldovan makes $120 a month,” Reade said. “They are a huge farming community, so on a day-to-day basis they don’t starve, what they don’t have are things like running water, electronics and technology but they do have 4G internet, they have a good internet infrastructure but nobody is using it.”

Peace Corp stationed Reade in the village of Cazangic with a population of 1,800 people. Working in the mayor’s office and the elementary school, Reade is trying to help combat two major health issues, child smoking and alcoholism via Moldova’s most popular sport, soccer.

Adapting and reinterpreting the successful African program, Grassroot Soccer, to Moldovan culture, Reade is able to teach the children about health risks before they leave their villages as 16-years-old to go to high school in the capital city, Chisinau.

Through active participation, Reade teaches the children the effects that smoking and drinking will have on their bodies. For example, using the soccer drill, running cones, each cone represents a “risk field” and each cone is introduced individually before the children run around the risks.

“Take smoking, for example, having them think of reasons why they shouldn’t smoke, then running through it, gets them thinking, and it’s done in a group setting,” Reade said.

As part of this project Reade is trying to work with the community to convert a large grassy area into a small-scale soccer field as a space for the children to practice.

By living with a host family for the past year and a half, Reade has seen first-hand how ingrained alcoholism is in Moldovan culture and is determined to get this program underway to help curb the cultural attitudes towards drinking.

“Grapes are the cash crop of Moldova, so they produce a lot of wine, and Moldovans do not sip their wine, they shoot it in a shot glass," Reade said. “In my host family’s house there is a three-year-old grandchild that comes over, and they will give him a half glass of wine. It starts that early here.”

Implementing the health initiative program through soccer has been a slow process, Reade said. Reade, the Peace Corps and the local community are trying to raise money to implement the initiative.

“We are trying to build a soccer field and we are trying to get a health program into this school, so we are raising money on the Internet," Reade said. "It is basically about a 5K project, so hopefully we’ll get that.”

Being in Moldova, Reade said, has set him on the path where he now knows, that when he arrives back in New Orleans in August he will be seeking ways to make a difference with youth.